Introduction to R

• About this course

• Acknowledgements

• About R
• R and a bit of history
• Online resources
• R and R-Studio installation and configuration
• First Steps with R
• Your first R session
• Data Objects
• Knowledge from data with R
• Data Import
• Data Manipulation
• Data Discovery
• Data Visualization
• Statistical Models
• Data Mining
• Reports with R Markdown

R and a bit of history

R is a programming environment for data analysis, graphics and statistical computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians for developing statistical software and data analysis. R was born as a dialect of the S language, which is a statistical programming language developed by John Chambers and others in Bell Laboratories. R is also very close to S-PLUS, which is a commercial implementation of the S programming language, sold by Insightful Corporation.

Let us see a bit of history.

S and a bit of history

S is a statistical programming language developed by John Chambers and others in Bell Laboratories. The aim of the language, as expressed by John Chambers, is “to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully”.

A bit of history:

• 1976: the first version of S is developed as an internal statistical analysis environment. It is originally implemented as Fortran libraries.
• 1980: the first version of S is distributed outside of Bell Laboratories. In 1981, source version is made available.
• 1984: Richard A. Becker and John M. Chambers, “S. An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics”. (Brown Book). Historical interest only.
• 1988: Richard A. Becker, John M. Chambers and Allan R. Wilks, “The New S Language”. London: Chapman & Hall. (Blue Book). It introduces what is now known as S version 2. The system is rewritten in C and begins to resemble the system that we have today.
• 1992: John M. Chambers and Trevor J. Hastie, “Statistical Models in S”. (White Book). It introduces S version 3, often abbreviated S3, which adds structures to facilitate statistical modeling in S.
• 1998: John M. Chambers, “Programming with Data”. (Green Book). It introduces S version 4, often abbreviated S4, which provides advanced object-oriented features. S4 classes differ markedly from S3 classes.

The S language itself has not changed dramatically since 1998.

S-PLUS and a bit of history

S-PLUS is a commercial implementation of the S programming language. S-PLUS provides a number of fancy features (GUIs, mostly) on top of it, hence the “PLUS”.

A bit of history:

• 1988: S-PLUS is first produced by a Seattle-based start-up company called Statistical Sciences, Inc. The founder and sole owner is R. Douglas Martin, professor of statistics at the University of Washington, Seattle.
• 1993: Statistical Sciences, Inc. acquires the exclusive license to distribute S and merges with MathSoft.
• 2001: MathSoft sells its Cambridge-based Engineering and Education Products Division (EEPD). It changes name to Insightful Corporation.
• 2004: Insightful purchases the S language from Lucent Technologies for $2 million.
• 2008: TIBCO acquires Insightful Corporation.

A bit of R history

R was initially developed in early 90s by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The R name is partly based on the (first) names of the first two R authors (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly a play on the name of S.

A bit of history:

• 1991: R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zeland.
• 1993: First announcement of R to the public.
• 1995: Martin Maechler convinces Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman to use the GNU General Public License to make R free software.
• 1997: The R Development Core Team is formed. The team controls the source code for R.
• 2000: R version 1.0.0 released. Developers consider R stable enough for production use.
• 2004: R version 2.0.0 released. Introduced lazy loading, which enables fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory.
• 2013: R version 3.0.0 released. Introduced long vectors.

While R is an open source project supported by the community developing it, some companies strive to provide commercial support and/or extensions for their customers. R history is intertwined with that of its commercial support:

• 2007: Revolution Analytics was founded to provide commercial support for Revolution R, the distribution of R developed by Revolution Analytics which also includes components developed by the company.
• 2010: RStudio was founded. It is a company that develops free and open tools for the R community.
• 2014: Microsoft Corporation starts the release of Microsoft R Open, an enhanced distribution of R, formerly known as Revolution R Open (RRO).
• 2015: Microsoft Corporation completed the acquisition of Revolution Analytics.

We will deepen the commercial support tools mentioned in Online Resources chapter.

Why R?

In December 2016, R is in 17th place of TIOBE Programming Community Index (www.tiobe.com), that is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. R is above SAS that is in 22th place.

R is the leading analytics tools for data science used by respondents to the Rexer Analytics Survey in 2015:

Moreover, the number of companies using R is grown all over the world:

Source: blog.revolutionanalytics.com